You're exactly right, which really just shows how useless this study was, or at least how useless the PC Pro summary of it is. A much more interesting study would tell us what sorts of tasks different people use the various operating systems for.
Sure, it certainly makes sense when you explain it out like that, but that doesn't mean that a family member of one of the innocent people who died isn't going to decide that they deserve money as compensation for their emotional pain and anguish. Zombiemaster is nowhere to be found, so they decide they're going to sue the bank, and the guard.
I would certainly argue that the guard isn't guilty of any wrongdoing, at least from a morality point of view. But when the law considers liability, we're not talking about morality. And even if the judge ends up ruling in favor of the guard, who knows what sort of legal bills he'll have racked up in the process.
There's a good argument to be made to also include sites that write from opinions that differ from yours, but I wouldn't say that a site that I generally agree with is useless. They might have access to information that I don't, in which case I can certainly learn something.
Yes, because it's taken my aeons to learn how to operate a car. Keeping track of a couple of things changing around on a web page is way more complicated than driving.
Next time someone hassles you when you'd rather not be hassled, man up and tell them to leave you alone. Or ignore them. If they don't get the hint, then block them. What's the big deal?
I guess my friends aren't as big a bunch of dicks as yours. Anybody that'd I'd consider a decent friend knows enough about my personality to not take it personally if I don't bother to answer. If they don't know me well enough to understand, then chances are I don't care what they think anyways so whatever.
Subscription based payment makes a lot more sense for MMOs because you're constantly using their server whenever you're playing. At an abstract level, separate from the question as to whether or not I'm getting good value for my money, just the basic concept makes some sense to me. I'm continually using their resources, and so I give them a few bucks each month.
At my job we use AutoCAD and Autodesk basically forced us into a subscription the last time we upgraded. So now instead of paying a big chunk of change to upgrade all of our licenses every few years, we send off a smaller (yet still significant) amount of money each year. The yearly subscriptions add up to about the same amount of money as we'd spend in the old bulk upgrades, but it's just one more thing that has to be remembered and budgeted each year. Autodesk pretends that we're getting a good deal, because they throw in a few minor pieces of software that nobody really has the time to learn, and because with our subscription we get "free" upgrades to each yearly release. Never mind the fact that we still only plan on installing new versions every few years because it's a big hassle. The subscription model makes very little sense from our point of view, we just plain don't like it. Unfortunately, we're pretty much at the mercy of Autodesk, because moving to new software would be an even bigger hassle.
First off, that guy doesn't actually run that much of the country, and he certainly wouldn't be the one who controlled their nukes. Second, I'm not convinced that he actually thinks the holocaust didn't happen. I think it's more likely that he's just saying it because he knows it'll piss people off. Internet forums aren't the only place that trolls exist. But there's a big space between being willing to say inflammatory stuff and vaporizing 100,000 people, especially when you know that millions of your people, and basically all of your wealth and power will be destroyed in return.
All that being said, it's preferable that they not have nukes, because the more people who have them, the more other people will try to get them, and having more nukes around isn't a good thing. But I don't believe that if they manage to get one that they're going to launch an attack on Israel, and I think that a preemptive attack against Iran is likely to have more serious negative effects than them building a bomb that they won't use offensively.
Yeah, but Iran serves double duty because not only do they supposedly want to blow up Israel, but they're also in a good position to become the biggest regional power (next to Israel). Even if you're good buddies with a nearby country, it can often be desirable to limit their influence, because any gain for them is likely a loss for you.
I'd actually take your theory further, to just about any industry that involves creating stuff. One of the realities of life is that just about anything worth doing requires a lot of work. And a lot of that work is dull and repetitive. For every creative superstar, there's usually a small army of grunts doing a whole bunch of groundwork.
For every gravity-defying glass and titanium museum that an architect dreams up, there's a bunch of people sitting at a computer drawing lines all day. Someone does hundreds of calculations to make sure it doesn't fall down. Someone has to pick out all the doorknobs. Someone has to sand all the gyp board walls. Despite all the heavy machinery available, a bunch of guys get stuck digging holes with shovels and then dumping buckets of concrete into them.
Until you nerds start building some awesome robots, the majority of the human race is going to be stuck doing menial tasks instead of creative work, if for no other reason than it has to be done by someone.
I'm only about a half decade out of college, but I've seen enough to be pretty well convinced that there's almost never any glory in any job where you're working for someone else. And that's doubly so in a field like IT where, for better or worse, you're basically there to support whatever it is your company really does.
Computers are just tools. At an abstract level, the IT staff is just a more highly-skilled version of the guy who makes sure everyone has enough pens and legal pads. That doesn't mean that it's not an important job, or that it can't be fulfilling, but I wouldn't expect it to be particularly glamorous.
The chances of the stand-off ending would likely remain the same that they are currently, which is to say, approximately 0%. The current Iranian government sees a lot of internal political value in having Israel (and the US) as a big scary enemy. Interestingly enough, Israel (and the US to a lesser extent) also use the threat of Iran as a political tool inside their own countries.
Imagine that Iran were to have a peaceful revolution tomorrow, overthrow their religious based government, install a democratic and secular government, abandon their nuclear ambitions, and make genuine peace gestures towards Israel. I think Israel would continue with to openly talk down to them and threaten them. Their government likes having them as an enemy, and even if they didn't feel threatened at all, they'll still take steps to try to limit Iran's regional influence.
While I'm sure that many people would be perfectly happy to see Israel go away, and for that land to be claimed by their buddies, 99.9% of the population of Iran spend their time worrying about other things. I'd disagree that Iran (in general or as a matter of actual policy that they're working towards) really gives a damn about eliminating Israel. They've got far more immediate and practical goals. But since Israel is there and making noise, they're more than happy to use it for their own political purposes.
Even if I believed that Iran was ruled by insane clerics willing to die and sacrifice Iran in order to dominate the world with Islam (I definitely don't believe that), I fail to understand what sort of calculation they might make that would have them believe that dropping a nuke in Israel would further that goal.
If they were to do that, the retaliation would be intense. It seems rather unlikely that it would spark any sort of Muslim uprising against the western world, and even if it did, the west militarily far outclasses the muslim world. I don't think it would work out well at all.
Anyone who thinks that Iran actually intends to try to blow up Israel is fooling themselves, just like the people who were convinced that Saddam Hussein was trying to get WMD's so he could attack the US. Iran certainly isn't run by a bunch of noble people, but it's not run by a bunch of suicidal wackos either. Suicidal wackos don't end up running countries. The people in power are primarily motivated by a desire to retain their power. You don't retain power by attacking countries that way outclass you militarily.
Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons as a deterrent and as a bargaining chip in negotiations. They're not going to rush to drop one on Israel, and they're not going to hand them out to terrorist groups. If a nuke went off in Israel, Iran would be toast within a matter of hours, and they know that.
The big difference here is that Iran has some capability to retaliate, where Syria basically had to just sit there and take it. Iran's response won't be aimed entirely towards Israel, they will take broader actions to disrupt the oil trade through the middle east. This is one of the big reasons why the US is applying so much pressure on Israel not to act, the response from Iran will basically force the US to get involved militarily.
But really, I think Israel is being unreasonable about the whole thing. Iran is not trying to build a nuke so they can drop it on Israel. Despite all the trumped up nonsense about destroying Israel, the Iranian leadership knows they would suffer way more destruction than they could inflict. Retaining their power is their number one priority, their belligerent attitude towards Israel is only expressed because they believe that it helps them maintain their control within their country.
The only problem with your argument is that you're wrong. Every game isn't guaranteed to earn piles of money (except for a handful of very popular franchises). Sure, they can print as many copies as they want without spending any more, but unfortunately for them, pressing discs doesn't make them any money. They have to sell all those copies before they get paid. Many games don't even earn back their development costs. That's why developers/publishers go out of business all the time.
Company A might make $150 million dollars selling a game that cost $100 million to make, but then on the other side of the balance sheet is a game that aslo cost $100 million to make but only brought in $60 mil in sales. There are still people making big piles of money, but it's not as cut and dry as saying that ooh Microsoft sold $300 million dollars worth of Halo 3, it cost $100 million to make, so that means Bill Gates has $200 million more in his bank account. Much of that extra money goes to help pay for games that didn't earn their costs back, or in the case of someone like MS, to pay to repair all those broken 360's.
I've been playing free solitaire games on various computers for like 20 years, and I can still kill time today playing it on my iphone. That doesn't mean that I got ripped off because I paid 40 bucks for civilization 2 and only got 100 hours of playtime out of it.
I guess my my point is, what exactly is your point?
While there will always be people writing little games as a hobby, I don't think the game industry is going to shift primarily to free mobile phone games. Sure, there's a lot of users there, but it's hard to make money giving away all of your products.
At a technical level, you're probably right, but be careful not to trivialize the effort involved in "redoing the UI". For any software of even moderate complexity, it's not just as simple as resizing buttons and moving things around a little bit. The way a user might want to interact with a program or a particular set of data on a small portable device is often quite different from how they'd approach it on a desktop computer.
Although we're talking about windows development, I'm going to steer us a little bit towards Apple, because I know more about that. The iPhone uses similar tools, API's, etc as Cocoa apps for the MacOS, so we've got some similarities to what you've said. Yet despite this, there are a number of developers who've attempted to port successful mac apps to the iPhone, and have ended up with less than stellar results.
Re:Cut Out the Middle Men
on
Why Games Cost $60
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Because people will still pay $60 for them? But mostly because if the retail copies of your game are $60 but you're selling them on your website for $30, your retail partners are going to get pissed off because you're undercutting them so much. Digital distribution is definitely becoming a big thing, but there's still enough money to be made in retail that you don't want best buy refusing to stock your game.
As retail becomes increasingly less important, I think we'll see an increase in the amount of games that you can download for cheaper than the usual retail price. It'll never drop down to $30-35 for a brand new AAA game, but maybe closer to $45 or so.
Having listened to the audiobook version of Hodgman's books a couple times, whenever I read anything that he has written, I cannot help but hear him narrating it in my head. He certainly has created a unique persona for himself ( I mean this in a good way.)
There's a lot more plastic easily available in the US than there is oil. The idea here isn't necessarily to replace pumping oil out of the ground, it's to make something useful out of piles of trash that aren't worth much of anything otherwise.
ArsTechnica always does a pretty thorough and reasonably technical review of each OSX release, and the latest one gives a pretty good explanation of GCD as well as Blocks.
Yeah, the issue with H1N1 doesn't have to do with its lethality. The bigger concern is that because it is different enough from previous flu strains that a given individual's immune system is unlikely to have a useful level of immunity to it. So basically you're more likely to get sick if you're exposed to it.
If you do get sick, your chances of becoming severely ill and/or dying is not higher than with the average seasonal flu. It really only becomes an issue on a larger scale. According to the CDC website, between 5-20% of the US gets the flu in a given year, and on average they estimate about 36,000 die each year. If H1N1 infects 50%, at 0.1% mortality rate, then you're looking at 150,000 dead. And while that's not civilization ending by any means, it's still a lot of extra dead people.
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You're exactly right, which really just shows how useless this study was, or at least how useless the PC Pro summary of it is. A much more interesting study would tell us what sorts of tasks different people use the various operating systems for.
Sure, it certainly makes sense when you explain it out like that, but that doesn't mean that a family member of one of the innocent people who died isn't going to decide that they deserve money as compensation for their emotional pain and anguish. Zombiemaster is nowhere to be found, so they decide they're going to sue the bank, and the guard.
I would certainly argue that the guard isn't guilty of any wrongdoing, at least from a morality point of view. But when the law considers liability, we're not talking about morality. And even if the judge ends up ruling in favor of the guard, who knows what sort of legal bills he'll have racked up in the process.
There's a good argument to be made to also include sites that write from opinions that differ from yours, but I wouldn't say that a site that I generally agree with is useless. They might have access to information that I don't, in which case I can certainly learn something.
.
Yes, because it's taken my aeons to learn how to operate a car. Keeping track of a couple of things changing around on a web page is way more complicated than driving.
Next time someone hassles you when you'd rather not be hassled, man up and tell them to leave you alone. Or ignore them. If they don't get the hint, then block them. What's the big deal?
I guess my friends aren't as big a bunch of dicks as yours. Anybody that'd I'd consider a decent friend knows enough about my personality to not take it personally if I don't bother to answer. If they don't know me well enough to understand, then chances are I don't care what they think anyways so whatever.
Subscription based payment makes a lot more sense for MMOs because you're constantly using their server whenever you're playing. At an abstract level, separate from the question as to whether or not I'm getting good value for my money, just the basic concept makes some sense to me. I'm continually using their resources, and so I give them a few bucks each month.
At my job we use AutoCAD and Autodesk basically forced us into a subscription the last time we upgraded. So now instead of paying a big chunk of change to upgrade all of our licenses every few years, we send off a smaller (yet still significant) amount of money each year. The yearly subscriptions add up to about the same amount of money as we'd spend in the old bulk upgrades, but it's just one more thing that has to be remembered and budgeted each year. Autodesk pretends that we're getting a good deal, because they throw in a few minor pieces of software that nobody really has the time to learn, and because with our subscription we get "free" upgrades to each yearly release. Never mind the fact that we still only plan on installing new versions every few years because it's a big hassle. The subscription model makes very little sense from our point of view, we just plain don't like it. Unfortunately, we're pretty much at the mercy of Autodesk, because moving to new software would be an even bigger hassle.
First off, that guy doesn't actually run that much of the country, and he certainly wouldn't be the one who controlled their nukes. Second, I'm not convinced that he actually thinks the holocaust didn't happen. I think it's more likely that he's just saying it because he knows it'll piss people off. Internet forums aren't the only place that trolls exist. But there's a big space between being willing to say inflammatory stuff and vaporizing 100,000 people, especially when you know that millions of your people, and basically all of your wealth and power will be destroyed in return.
All that being said, it's preferable that they not have nukes, because the more people who have them, the more other people will try to get them, and having more nukes around isn't a good thing. But I don't believe that if they manage to get one that they're going to launch an attack on Israel, and I think that a preemptive attack against Iran is likely to have more serious negative effects than them building a bomb that they won't use offensively.
Yeah, but Iran serves double duty because not only do they supposedly want to blow up Israel, but they're also in a good position to become the biggest regional power (next to Israel). Even if you're good buddies with a nearby country, it can often be desirable to limit their influence, because any gain for them is likely a loss for you.
I'd actually take your theory further, to just about any industry that involves creating stuff. One of the realities of life is that just about anything worth doing requires a lot of work. And a lot of that work is dull and repetitive. For every creative superstar, there's usually a small army of grunts doing a whole bunch of groundwork.
For every gravity-defying glass and titanium museum that an architect dreams up, there's a bunch of people sitting at a computer drawing lines all day. Someone does hundreds of calculations to make sure it doesn't fall down. Someone has to pick out all the doorknobs. Someone has to sand all the gyp board walls. Despite all the heavy machinery available, a bunch of guys get stuck digging holes with shovels and then dumping buckets of concrete into them.
Until you nerds start building some awesome robots, the majority of the human race is going to be stuck doing menial tasks instead of creative work, if for no other reason than it has to be done by someone.
I'm only about a half decade out of college, but I've seen enough to be pretty well convinced that there's almost never any glory in any job where you're working for someone else. And that's doubly so in a field like IT where, for better or worse, you're basically there to support whatever it is your company really does.
Computers are just tools. At an abstract level, the IT staff is just a more highly-skilled version of the guy who makes sure everyone has enough pens and legal pads. That doesn't mean that it's not an important job, or that it can't be fulfilling, but I wouldn't expect it to be particularly glamorous.
The chances of the stand-off ending would likely remain the same that they are currently, which is to say, approximately 0%. The current Iranian government sees a lot of internal political value in having Israel (and the US) as a big scary enemy. Interestingly enough, Israel (and the US to a lesser extent) also use the threat of Iran as a political tool inside their own countries.
Imagine that Iran were to have a peaceful revolution tomorrow, overthrow their religious based government, install a democratic and secular government, abandon their nuclear ambitions, and make genuine peace gestures towards Israel. I think Israel would continue with to openly talk down to them and threaten them. Their government likes having them as an enemy, and even if they didn't feel threatened at all, they'll still take steps to try to limit Iran's regional influence.
While I'm sure that many people would be perfectly happy to see Israel go away, and for that land to be claimed by their buddies, 99.9% of the population of Iran spend their time worrying about other things. I'd disagree that Iran (in general or as a matter of actual policy that they're working towards) really gives a damn about eliminating Israel. They've got far more immediate and practical goals. But since Israel is there and making noise, they're more than happy to use it for their own political purposes.
Even if I believed that Iran was ruled by insane clerics willing to die and sacrifice Iran in order to dominate the world with Islam (I definitely don't believe that), I fail to understand what sort of calculation they might make that would have them believe that dropping a nuke in Israel would further that goal.
If they were to do that, the retaliation would be intense. It seems rather unlikely that it would spark any sort of Muslim uprising against the western world, and even if it did, the west militarily far outclasses the muslim world. I don't think it would work out well at all.
Anyone who thinks that Iran actually intends to try to blow up Israel is fooling themselves, just like the people who were convinced that Saddam Hussein was trying to get WMD's so he could attack the US. Iran certainly isn't run by a bunch of noble people, but it's not run by a bunch of suicidal wackos either. Suicidal wackos don't end up running countries. The people in power are primarily motivated by a desire to retain their power. You don't retain power by attacking countries that way outclass you militarily.
Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons as a deterrent and as a bargaining chip in negotiations. They're not going to rush to drop one on Israel, and they're not going to hand them out to terrorist groups. If a nuke went off in Israel, Iran would be toast within a matter of hours, and they know that.
The big difference here is that Iran has some capability to retaliate, where Syria basically had to just sit there and take it. Iran's response won't be aimed entirely towards Israel, they will take broader actions to disrupt the oil trade through the middle east. This is one of the big reasons why the US is applying so much pressure on Israel not to act, the response from Iran will basically force the US to get involved militarily.
But really, I think Israel is being unreasonable about the whole thing. Iran is not trying to build a nuke so they can drop it on Israel. Despite all the trumped up nonsense about destroying Israel, the Iranian leadership knows they would suffer way more destruction than they could inflict. Retaining their power is their number one priority, their belligerent attitude towards Israel is only expressed because they believe that it helps them maintain their control within their country.
The only problem with your argument is that you're wrong. Every game isn't guaranteed to earn piles of money (except for a handful of very popular franchises). Sure, they can print as many copies as they want without spending any more, but unfortunately for them, pressing discs doesn't make them any money. They have to sell all those copies before they get paid. Many games don't even earn back their development costs. That's why developers/publishers go out of business all the time.
Company A might make $150 million dollars selling a game that cost $100 million to make, but then on the other side of the balance sheet is a game that aslo cost $100 million to make but only brought in $60 mil in sales. There are still people making big piles of money, but it's not as cut and dry as saying that ooh Microsoft sold $300 million dollars worth of Halo 3, it cost $100 million to make, so that means Bill Gates has $200 million more in his bank account. Much of that extra money goes to help pay for games that didn't earn their costs back, or in the case of someone like MS, to pay to repair all those broken 360's.
I've been playing free solitaire games on various computers for like 20 years, and I can still kill time today playing it on my iphone. That doesn't mean that I got ripped off because I paid 40 bucks for civilization 2 and only got 100 hours of playtime out of it.
I guess my my point is, what exactly is your point?
While there will always be people writing little games as a hobby, I don't think the game industry is going to shift primarily to free mobile phone games. Sure, there's a lot of users there, but it's hard to make money giving away all of your products.
At a technical level, you're probably right, but be careful not to trivialize the effort involved in "redoing the UI". For any software of even moderate complexity, it's not just as simple as resizing buttons and moving things around a little bit. The way a user might want to interact with a program or a particular set of data on a small portable device is often quite different from how they'd approach it on a desktop computer.
Although we're talking about windows development, I'm going to steer us a little bit towards Apple, because I know more about that. The iPhone uses similar tools, API's, etc as Cocoa apps for the MacOS, so we've got some similarities to what you've said. Yet despite this, there are a number of developers who've attempted to port successful mac apps to the iPhone, and have ended up with less than stellar results.
Because people will still pay $60 for them? But mostly because if the retail copies of your game are $60 but you're selling them on your website for $30, your retail partners are going to get pissed off because you're undercutting them so much. Digital distribution is definitely becoming a big thing, but there's still enough money to be made in retail that you don't want best buy refusing to stock your game.
As retail becomes increasingly less important, I think we'll see an increase in the amount of games that you can download for cheaper than the usual retail price. It'll never drop down to $30-35 for a brand new AAA game, but maybe closer to $45 or so.
What kind of games do you like? Your question is fairly worthless without that info.
I just spent about an hour reading your blog instead of working. It's very interesting and often amusing. Thanks for taking the time to write it.
Having listened to the audiobook version of Hodgman's books a couple times, whenever I read anything that he has written, I cannot help but hear him narrating it in my head. He certainly has created a unique persona for himself ( I mean this in a good way.)
There's a lot more plastic easily available in the US than there is oil. The idea here isn't necessarily to replace pumping oil out of the ground, it's to make something useful out of piles of trash that aren't worth much of anything otherwise.
ArsTechnica always does a pretty thorough and reasonably technical review of each OSX release, and the latest one gives a pretty good explanation of GCD as well as Blocks.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.ars
The GCD stuff in particular starts on page 12, but the previous couple pages give a little bit of useful background on why it's important.
Yeah, the issue with H1N1 doesn't have to do with its lethality. The bigger concern is that because it is different enough from previous flu strains that a given individual's immune system is unlikely to have a useful level of immunity to it. So basically you're more likely to get sick if you're exposed to it.
If you do get sick, your chances of becoming severely ill and/or dying is not higher than with the average seasonal flu. It really only becomes an issue on a larger scale. According to the CDC website, between 5-20% of the US gets the flu in a given year, and on average they estimate about 36,000 die each year. If H1N1 infects 50%, at 0.1% mortality rate, then you're looking at 150,000 dead. And while that's not civilization ending by any means, it's still a lot of extra dead people.